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programming ruby?

hi guys
Ok, I know this isn't actually anything related to do with web programming but anyways.....................

Does anyone here in Ruby Programming? I was starting to delve into it, so I thought that maybe it'll be better to get some Ruby programmer's comments/suggestions on it.

So, those of you who Ruby, what do you think about its future & scope? Is it going to catch up with big players like Java, C++, C#, VB.NET & Delphi? I know its not quite popular & its been around for quite a while but I also know that its easy to use & quite powerful.

I'm mainly talking about using RUBY for creating desktop applications. Though I've heard that it can be used for web applications too, like ASP/PHP. Is that true??

If RUBY is used to create a desktop application, does it require RUBY to be installed on the machine to run the application or not?

From the little I know about Ruby, I do believe it's an interpreted language, which means it has to be installed on the target machine. Of course if Ruby is good for creating desktop apps then there's probably one or more utilities out there that will let you package everything that's needed into one bundle.(I'm thinking of something along the lines of Perl2exe)

Thanks for the link ed. I think that rubyscript2exe is to be used with tar2rubyscript which is available at http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/tar2rubyscript/. tar2rubyscript creates RBA(Ruby Archives) & rubyscript2exe creates exe from RBA's.